Demonstrate Path Users Will Take on Your Website

Think of your website pages as reusable building blocks. For example, the header of your site is usually in the uppermost part of the page, and you usually want to keep it consistent across the site. It’s the same concept as a pile of uniformly shaped building blocks that a construction team uses to make sure that all its walls fit together nicely.

Your wireframe helps you visualize and create these consistent building blocks ¯ and this result, in turn, helps your users efficiently navigate your site to find what they're looking for. To help you appreciate how wireframes look and work, look at a model a fictitious example of how to develop the wireframes for an art museum in Seattle.

As you start the process of designing interior content pages, you should organize the main subsections, and then extend this process to the final destination pages of your site ¯ for example, a transaction page, where your users buy merchandise, or a page with forms where your users can respond to your content.

These pages are the logical ends of the road for your users because the whole point of your site has been to lead them to a place where, after looking at your content, they take the action you want them to take (and have been nudging them toward all along).

In this figure, you see how the interior content page is designed to entice users into performing various Web 2.0 actions: share the museum’s content with their friends or share their thoughts and feelings about the content by posting a comment. Notice how the wireframe includes elements such as rating stars, where users can vote on the content, as well as clear links to the form pages.